Following the pre-announcements from MySpace and Facebook (below), it seems Google wants to get in on the act. According to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google's Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.
However, the services may not work the same way. The story says:
If what we hear is correct, Google's offering may not be as attractive as MySpace's and Facebook's. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google's servers in an iframe. By contract [sic], MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
Well, Google already has a record of all your searches (some of them probably incriminating), probably reads your email and therefore has a list of your contacts, and maybe it even keeps your calendar. It could probably write software to dig out all the info you might put in a Facebook or MySpace profile, though you willingly handing it over might make it simpler to profile you for advertising purposes.
And although Google hasn't managed to create a widely-successful social networking platform (it launched Orkut in January 2004), it would be a simple matter to tie your profile to iGoogle and outflank both Facebook and MySpace.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft have failed to launch "connect" systems (Microsoft Connect is a different kind of thing). And you obviously won't expect a joint announcement from those two....
